2

Setting Up the Environment for Our E-Commerce Application

To build a house, we need various tools and materials. The more sophisticated the tools, the easier it will be to erect the house, and the better the materials, the longer the house will last. The same is true with software. Appropriate tools can help increase our productivity, and suitable components can make our software easier to maintain. In this chapter, we will set up the development environment for the example application that we will be building throughout this book: a virtual store that allows customers to be registered and buy products. The tools chosen are all free and open source software (OSS) with distributions for the most used operating systems in the world.

In this chapter, we’ll be covering the following topics:

• Installing a generic PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) environment, with a web server, PHP interpreter, and relational database management system (RDBMS)
• Two different...